The Long Long Life of Landscape
Fiona Stafford
John Murray, 2024, 285 pages
Hardback: £20 | ISBN 9781473683628
Review by Barry Larking
A simple way to review this book would be to quote from almost any page. The writing is fluent, engaging and intriguing, response and information deftly infused. Stafford’s day job never denies the reader being drawn into her subject daunted by the range of her references. This is not the writing of someone who wishes to demonstrate erudition but an enthusiast for many things who is entranced by her observations, rumination, excursions and references popular and scholarly; she lives her subject and that is what is conveyed with naturalness and empathy.
The relationships we feel to a place can be initiated in ways we lose in the telling unless, as here and some literary exemplars, a necessary explicit mood or colour, a sensory experience, brings forth a world of memory: À la recherche du temps perdu – minus the tremulous uncertainty (or length!) of that signpost to the past and present. Such immediate reaction is the genesis for this work. The fleeting sensation leading to much beyond itself, however trivial in origin.
“A solitary encounter can open the way to invisible worlds, past and present, to places far away or near at hand, but hiding in plain sight”.
It is meant as no insult to observe there are an increasing number who can turn a nice phrase when it comes to scenery and or wildlife. That this has its failings is sure. Finally, one surfeits on such musings. However, here there is a welcome refreshment arising from a combination of shrewd observation, accepting the quotidian – ice cream van in a storied landscape? – and flitting unselfconsciously from Ancient and Modern, demonstrated wonderfully in an entire chapter on the humble house brick, uses abuses and origin in nature and once again, more habitat of sorts left by its creation in the shapes of old brickfields.
Chapters move between family history and friends that mapped out first and lasting contact with place and natural history; people migrate as do animals and in so doing unfold in memories; constant details recalled in later age that hovered for good reason, for later significance and understanding to emerge.
I read Time and Tide in combination with another book written by a distinguished and respected naturalist. It was a revealing combo. One was about the nuts and bolts of conservation – meetings, writing applications and filing reports, marshalling arguments, wrestling administrative distractions and, briefly, satisfaction on achieving a goal. Stafford’s engrossing read, without stressing it once, for this reader made the point that all bureaucratic endeavour must have larger meaning at heart, for the effort to have significance to our own lived lives. No one who recalls Darwin’s thoughts on the humble hedge needs reminding of this transformative purpose. We love Nature, landscape and history, for what these reveal to ourselves wherever we found them, beyond the reaches of time or tide.